Wednesday, December 24, 2008

After playing the Ball lot and all that happened there, I decided I should probably go ahead and play the Wieser lot and do their challenge before any of them got any more tangled up in the lives of the others in the neighborhood. The challenge for this lot was The Supernatural Challenge which focuses on Bud Wieser, and involves his friends Dan Druff, Misty Cupp, and Luke Warm. When you first load the lot, Bud, Misty and Dan are there, and Luke is a tombstone on the front lawn. Along the way they get to experience zombies, vampires, a cowplant and aliens. Before I get started on their story, let's meet them.

Notice that Misty is labeled as being Misty Druff on her picture? Well, that's because almost as soon as I'd started playing the lot after renovating and furnishing the house, ACR got ahold of her and Dan, and before I knew it they were in bed and I heard chimes. This immediately threw a bit of a kink in the plan I'd had to have Dan move in with Crystal to help raise their triplets once I'd finished this challenge. Misty was slated to get eaten by a cowplant at some point to satisfy the requirements of the challenge, so a relationship between them at this point didn't really matter, but for Dan to move in with Crystal, he'd have had to leave his child with Misty behind, and I'd hate to split up a parent and child like that. But I went along with it and figured I'd sort it out later. Then - and this is where I messed up and made the challenge uncompletable with the original sims, more on that later - I decided that if Dan was going to have a kid with Misty, I wanted it to have his name, so I had them get married. Just an informal exchange of rings, nothing fancy. A few days later, Misty gave birth to their son Nathan. He grew to child while they were still on the lot, though was close to becoming a teen by the time they moved. Here's a look at how he progressed - I'll introduce you to him more completely in a future post.

Meanwhile, all of them got jobs. Bud got a job in the Paranormal field to start working toward the grim phone reward that he would need to resurrect Luke as part of the challenge, as well as a position as UFO Investigator which was another requirement for him. Misty got a job in the Natural Science field to start working toward getting the cowplant that would cause her ultimate demise. She of course didn't get to start right away due to her pregnancy. Dan had no particular career requirements for the challenge, so I got him a job in the Medical field to work toward his LTW. Once Nathan was born, their work schedules were all spread out such that there was always someone home, so a nanny was never needed for him. Misty hadn't been back at work very long when thanks to ACR, she got pregnant again, thus further complicating the plan to have Dan move in with Crystal when this was all done. At least she was getting plenty of time to work on her skills so she'd be all set for promotions while she was on maternity leave. Shortly after Nathan had transitioned to toddler, she gave birth to their second son, Neville. By the time they moved, he'd become a child. Here's a look at how he progressed - as with Nathan, I'll introduce you to him better in a future post.

While Misty and Dan were busy filling the house with babies, Bud was working on his skills and friendships to get promotions. By the time Neville was born, or shortly thereafter, he had gotten the promotions he needed to unlock the grim phone reward. He collected his reward, set it up in the study, and made the phone call to the Grim Reaper to bring Luke back to life. Since the challenge required that Luke be resurrected as a zombie, however, he didn't pay very much even though they could have afforded it. And with that, I had my first ever zombie, with the typical zombie personality.

I wasn't sure what to expect with Luke the Zombie, but I found out they're not really all that bad. His needs were all near critical at first, of course, though it didn't take all that long to get him into better shape. I learned that his needs, some of them at least, deplete a lot faster than normal sims, so he takes a bit more maintenance. He also reminded me pretty quickly of why I don't let very sloppy sims take a shower - they can't seem to do so without flooding the bathroom and making a huge mess that they whine about when you make them clean it up. Luckily I'd also put a bathtub in the house, so most of the time I can direct him to use that instead of the shower. Overall, however, he made a pretty good addition to the household. I didn't make him get a job, so he was always at home to serve as a live-in nanny of sorts for Nathan and Neville. He did pretty good at it too, and at times I think he was doing more for the kids than their parents were. When he wasn't taking care of the kids, he spent most of his time playing chess to work on his Logic skills and to cater to his love of Games.

Once he'd resurrected Luke, Bud got to work on one of the next requirements of the challenge and went downtown to try to meet a vampire. He got lucky, and was able to meet Contessa Angel Tellerman and get to know her fairly well.

He didn't immediately work their relationship up high enough for her to bite him, but he continued to call her and work on the friendship. In due time, they were best friends, and one night when he was off work, he invited her over. Prior to this, however, I'd had him call up the gypsy woman and have her come over so he could buy a few bottles of the vampire cure potion. He gave one to Dan as a gift, to give his relationship with him an extra boost and so Dan would have one in his inventory, then kept the other two. Once they were both set up to be able to change themselves back quickly after being bitten, I had Bud invite Contessa Angel over. Within minutes of her arrival and Bud greeting her she was working her spell on Bud and then bending him over to have a drink. Bud was thrilled to become a vampire, and immediately went inside to nibble on Dan. Then, once Dan had turned, I had both of them chug their potions. And voila, three of the challenge requirements met within a couple sim hours. Bud pretty much ignored Contessa Angel after this - eventually she either left on her own with dawn came, or he said goodbye to her, I forget which it was. Since she'd served her purpose, and their chemistry wasn't really high enough for her to be a good romantic match for him, I didn't make any direct efforts for him to stay in contact with her after that.

Next on the agenda for Bud was for him to get abducted by aliens. This is where the Freetime aspiration rewards came in handy - with the Summon Aliens ability he got from the Knowledge line, he had no real trouble getting himself abducted. I did learn that the ability only really works at night, however. When I sent him to the telescope to Summon Aliens during the daytime, he just stood there swinging it back and forth and up, and murmuring something along the lines of "Here alien, alien, alien" but nothing ever happened. When I sent him to do it after dark, he got abducted almost immediately. And soon, baby number 3 for the household was on the way. Luckily Nathan had aged up to child by this point, or was close to it, so I didn't have to get any extra cribs, not that buying one would have been a problem for them. A few days later, Bud gave birth to his son Castor who by the time I finished with this lot had aged up to toddler.

Now, the only thing left for Bud to achieve for the challenge was to Drink Misty Cupp. Misty eventually had managed to stop being pregnant long enough to go to work and get a few promotions while everything else was going on in the house, and so not to long after this she was able to get the cowplant reward. For reasons I don't quite remember now, I didn't feed her to it immediately upon getting it, though I did within a few days. Her husband and kids were understandably devastated. But, not to worry, we have a grim phone in the house, and we have lots of money now, so we can get her back easily and as good as new. I had by this point given up on the idea of moving Dan in with Crystal and had decided instead to have the Druffs move out to their own place once the challenge was finished. So, once Bud had gone out to drink Misty from the cowplant, I had him resurrect her. He paid top dollar this time, so she came back perfectly. And as a bit of a surprise, she was still married to Dan. Nothing had changed with any of her relationships that I could tell. Not sure why this was, but I'm guessing it had to do with how quickly she was resurrected - it was within sim hours of her death. At this point I thought I was done with the challenge. I exited the game and ran the challenge wizard to be sure though before moving the Druffs out, and...I wasn't. It hadn't registered that he had Drunk Misty Cupp. Hrm. I went back into the game to check his memories, thinking maybe resurrecting her so soon somehow negated it, but no, he still had a memory of "Drank Misty". Huh. Well, we'll try again.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try again right away, because just after Misty had been brought back to life, ACR had its way with her and Dan again and she once again was pregnant. Quite the fertile woman is Misty. This forced me to wait until she'd had her baby, since while I was perfectly willing to kill her again for the good of the challenge, I wasn't willing to kill the baby as well. So, I waited, and a few days later she gave birth to her third son, Norris. Then, almost immediately after she'd given birth to him, I sent her back out to the cowplant. It gobbled her up, then I sent Bud out to milk it and drink her. I checked his memories, and now he had two "Drank Misty" memories in his panel. This time I held off on resurrecting her and exited to check it with the wizard to see if it had completed. It hadn't. Still didn't register a completion for the "Drink Misty Cupp" requirement. *sigh* So, all I can think of at this point is that there must be something in the code that knows he drank Misty Druff, not Misty Cupp, even though the memory just says Misty with no last name, and it must be making a difference to the challenge wizard being able to recognize it as completed. So...while I could have just called it finished at this point, I wanted it to get officially marked off as completed, so I decided that I'd just have to create another Misty Cupp to feed to the cowplant, which I did. Here she is:

I did goof a little though, and moved her onto the lot before I'd resurrected the original Misty again, and once I had, the lot was full and it wouldn't let me resurrect her. So I had to have Dan go ahead and move out with his boys to the house I'd already gotten ready for them. Once they had gone, I was able to resurrect Misty Druff with no problems. This time, however, she came back unmarried, and she didn't even know Dan at all now. He was missing completely from her relationships window. She still knew all of her children though, and her relationships with them were unchanged, even baby Norris who she'd only just given birth to when she died. Her not knowing Dan was bothersome, but I figured I could fix it easily enough by having one of the boys invite her over once I'd finished with things in the Wieser house.

Now that I had the original Misty Cupp, who was now Misty Druff, back and mostly ready to go and start a new life with Dan once I got the relationship issues straightened out, it was time for the new Misty Cupp to meet the cowplant. Like a trooper, she went marching right out to its pen at my command and soon she was a tombstone by its pot. I sent Bud out to have his 3rd drink of cowplant juice, checked the memories to make sure "Drank Misty" was there for a 3rd time, and exited. And, hooray! it worked. The challenge was now complete, and I was free to go follow the Druffs to their new house and work on getting their family back together. Stay tuned for a follow up report on them in the next post. For now, I'll end this post with a look at how things stand with the Wieser lot currently:

Future plans for the Wieser household involve getting Bud and the new Misty Cupp together as a couple. Perhaps they'll have some kids together so Castor won't be an only child. I'll most likely keep Luke with them in the house. Always nice having a live-in nanny for the kids. And might be kind of cool seeing him get to know subsequent generations of Wiesers without ever changing himself.

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comments:

I have played around with the Summon Aliens feature and found that you can get sims abducted during the day. I went further and found that you can get one sim abducted before the other sim is back from visiting outer space. I never would have thought it would work but I figured you never know until you try. Besides my sister was there egging me on the entire time. I hardly ever use this anymore though because my sims get abducted to often as it is.

I mainly used the summon aliens thing with Bud because one of the challenge objectives was for him to meet aliens. And I figured it would be way easier and faster than just parking him at the telescope all night every night waiting for it to happen. I did have TwoJeff's hack for higher chance of abductions at one point, but I took it out after a bit because my sims were getting abducted nearly every time they used the stupid telescope.